Stone upon Stone

The significant buildings of a city, its churches, its cathedrals, these work as the icons of place, they make a particular place recognisable, in this sense they create its soul. Here are the landmarks of the world, in this way, constructed from beautiful local stone; that tend to be beautiful in themselves. But there is a further consideration to this, for there is no avoiding how these buildings are also in their various ways unique monuments to greed. Houses of wealth, acquisition, containing the goods, the gold and silver, of looted paradises. And so symbolic of a politics. Transliterate the motives that built these buildings, and these churches, into the present, and what do you have? What are their equals? The office blocks. The supermarkets. The transparently faceless, placeless things that stand in their stead like litter. Looking out at the City of London, visible from the Horniman Park away in the South, on an early soft summer evening, it is quite stunning, because it is not recognisable but as a threat. There is nothing there. There is no ‘local stone’. No one is seeing the black interplanetary towers that rise like columns of ice, the symbols of a race that lives in elsewhere’s sigil. Monumental shards to the mineral.